Scott Manley | Why A 1950's Rocket Engine Design Flies On NASA's 21st Century Moon Rocket. @scottmanley | Uploaded 1 year ago | Updated 1 day ago
The AJ-10 Series of Engines dates to the 1950's and an example flew last year on Artemis 1, propelling Orion into a distant retrograde orbit around the moon. It's not a single engine design, but the common factor is pressure fed, hypergolic bipropellent engines designed and built by Aerojet.
The earliest examples I can find were the AJ-10-24 on Aerobee sounding rockets, generating just over 1 ton of thrust. The AJ-10-37 propelled the Vanguard rocket second stage, which was a 3.5 ton thrust engine. That was adapted to fly on Thor/Delta, Atlas and Titan. Then the Apollo Service Propulsion system used a much larger design, which was largely a complete redesign.
The shuttle Orbital maneuvering system thrusters were a smaller 2.5 ton engine running on MMH/NTO and those same engines were refurbished for flight on Orion.
This is a fine table listing the known AJ-10 variants used in orbital spaceflight.
http://www.b14643.de/Spacerockets/Specials/U.S._Rocket_engines/engines.htm
Follow me on Twitter for more updates:
https://twitter.com/DJSnM
I have a discord server where I regularly turn up:
https://discord.gg/zStmKbM
If you really like what I do you can support me directly through Patreon
https://www.patreon.com/scottmanley
The AJ-10 Series of Engines dates to the 1950's and an example flew last year on Artemis 1, propelling Orion into a distant retrograde orbit around the moon. It's not a single engine design, but the common factor is pressure fed, hypergolic bipropellent engines designed and built by Aerojet.
The earliest examples I can find were the AJ-10-24 on Aerobee sounding rockets, generating just over 1 ton of thrust. The AJ-10-37 propelled the Vanguard rocket second stage, which was a 3.5 ton thrust engine. That was adapted to fly on Thor/Delta, Atlas and Titan. Then the Apollo Service Propulsion system used a much larger design, which was largely a complete redesign.
The shuttle Orbital maneuvering system thrusters were a smaller 2.5 ton engine running on MMH/NTO and those same engines were refurbished for flight on Orion.
This is a fine table listing the known AJ-10 variants used in orbital spaceflight.
http://www.b14643.de/Spacerockets/Specials/U.S._Rocket_engines/engines.htm
Follow me on Twitter for more updates:
https://twitter.com/DJSnM
I have a discord server where I regularly turn up:
https://discord.gg/zStmKbM
If you really like what I do you can support me directly through Patreon
https://www.patreon.com/scottmanley
